Socialist Pop After Cultural Revolution

문화혁명기 이후의 중국의 사회주의 팝아트

This thesis examines contemporary Chinese painting after the Cultural Revolution(1966~76), focusing upon so-called "Chinese Pop art", which I termed as "Socialist Pop art". I considered the art of this period within the broader context of social changes especially after the Tienanmen incident of 1989. After the Cultural Revolution during which idolization of Chairman Mao was at its peak, one of the major changes in communist China was that an anti-Mao wave was generated in almost every social class. For example, novels that revealed the hardships during the Cultural Revolution were published. Posters that openly criticized the Maoism were also produced and displayed on the walls, and demand for democracy spurred widespread activist movements among young generations. These broad social changes were also reflected in art. A variety of art movements were introduced from the West to China, and after a period of experimentation with the new imported styles, artists began to apply the new artistic idiom to their works in order to visualize their own social and political realities they lived in. It was a shift from earlier Socialist Realism to a new expression either directly or indirectly, "Socialist Pop", an amalgam of Socialist Realism and Pop art tradition. After the 1989 crackdown of Tienanmen Square protest, when communist government quelled with brutal measures the students, workers, and ordinary people who rose for democracy, greater urge to protest the Deng Xiaoping regime emerged. This time coincided with the gradual emergence of art using Pop art vocabulary to satirize the social reality, the Socialist Pop art, along with many other art forms all with avant-garde spirit. One of the most frequent subjects of Chinese Pop art was visual images of Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution, and new China that was saturated with capitalism, which tainted the Chinese way of life with a Western way of consumerism and commercialism. The reason for the popularity of Mao's image was spurred by the "Mao Craze" in the early 1990's. People suddenly began to fall in a kind of nostalgia for the past, and once again, Mao Zedong was idolized as an entity who can heal the problems of modern China who had been marching towards their ultimate destination, the economic development. But this time Chairman Mao was no more an idol but just a popular, commercial product. He is no more an object of worship of almost religious nature but he has become an iconography symbolizing the complex nature of present Chinese society. During this process of depicting the social reality, Chinese artists are making the authority and sanctity of Maoism ineffective. Dealing with this new trend of contemporary Chinese art in view of "Socialist Pop art" two manners of re-creating Pop art can be illustrated: one that incorporates the propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution; the other borrows from Chinese traditional popular imagery or mass media, such as photos taken during Mao era. What is worth mentioning is that these posters and photos of the Cultural Revolution can be identified as 'popular' media, as they were directed to educate the popular mass, thus combination of this ingenuous pop media with Western Pop art can be fully justified as a genre unique to China. Through this genre, we can discover a new chapter of the Chinese contemporary painting and its society, as their Pop art can be considered as self-portraits true to their present appearances.